


begin to hope

by Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Complete, Established Relationship, F/M, Force-Sensitive Finn (Star Wars), Gen, POV Finn (Star Wars), Past Relationship(s), Pining, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Stand Alone, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, past rebel captain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-18 04:30:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21938356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome/pseuds/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome
Summary: In training to be a Jedi, Finn's thoughts remain focused on all that he could have said to Rey. A conversation with a wise old spy, well-versed in second chances, gives Finn the courage to speak.
Relationships: Cassian Andor & Finn, Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor/Leia Organa, Finn/Rey (Star Wars)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 47





	begin to hope

**Author's Note:**

> This fic comes after [A Lifetime in one Kiss](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21926848) but it can stand alone, if you're more interested in the FinnRey goodness below.

War, Finn is beginning to think, might be easier than peace. It’s a terrible, stupid, stupid thought, he knows, but he thinks it all the same. Because in war, there is no downtime, no long moments to overthink every foolish thing he’d ever said, everything he’d left unsaid, everything, in short, that he regretted.

“I’m an idiot,” he says, again, to BB-8, who simply rolls and chirps back at him. The two of them are alone in a clearing, deep inside the forest that houses Leia’s makeshift Jedi training camp. Finn rolls his eyes, “yeah, I know Poe wouldn’t like to hear me say that. But Poe’s not here right now, is he?”

BB-8 whistles, low and rather judgingly. The droid’s vocabulary has grown a great deal in the past few months of peace.

Finn thinks that BB-8 sounds more like Artoo with each passing day.

BB-8 thinks that Finn sounds more depressed with each passing day.

The two of them keep those thoughts to themselves. Instead, Finn answers what the droid did say. “I can’t,” Finn says. “I can’t talk to him right now. He’s busy with all his old friends, And Rey’s… well, she’s busy too.” Finn misses them both, terribly. He misses Rey just a bit more, and tells himself that’s because Poe leaves such long, chatty, comm messages. Finn tells himself that, but he’s pretty sure he can’t fool his own heart for much longer.

There’s one more whistle, short, and sharp.

“I really don’t think she wants me to comm her right now. She’d tell me to focus on my training, if she was here. Since General Organa--”

A warning beep echoes from deep inside the droid.

“I know, I know she’s not a general anymore. I just can’t call her _Leia._ She’s… she’s a legend! And I certainly can’t call her Mrs. Organa. I mean, is that even her last name now? After that trip to--”

“She’s still an Organa,” a new voice, calm, low, slightly accented with that unfamiliar inflection Finn is just starting to learn, says. “And I assure you, no trip I take with her will change that.”

Commander Cassian Andor has stepped into the small clearing. He’d somehow managed to approach so silently that Finn hadn’t noticed. Finn tells himself that it makes sense; that if the stories are true (and aren’t the stories always true?) that Cassian has been General Organa’s best spy for a long, long time. What is even more impressive is that the silver-haired man’s presence in the Force had been completely cloaked too.

 _Either that, or I’m even worse at this Force-detection-business than I thought,_ Finn muses dejectedly. His shoulders slump with the weight of another frustration, another possible setback. He’s never going to be a Jedi. He’s going to fail his friends. He’s going to disappoint Rey.

Once again, the regret spiral sets in. Finn feels so stupid, so foolish, so at odds with himself. But he keeps it all close, saying nothing.

Commander Andor pats BB-8 gently, a warm smile crossing his weathered face. It's the sort of touch few people give to a droid. Most assume a droid has no feelings. Finn's respect for Cassian moves up yet another notch, in part, because Finn knows that he was once someone that many thought did not have feelings either. The trouble is, Finn has come to realize, that he had thought that too. He had been told, so many times, back in those dark days as a stormtrooper, that he had no feelings, that he mattered to no one.

He had been told that and had fought to believe otherwise.

He had just never thought he would still be fighting to believe, even now, in peace time.

“You keep good company,” Commander Andor says to Finn. “This one is quite the impressive droid.”

That earns a loud chirp, plus a happy roll in a circle, from BB-8.

“I agree,” Finn says, nodding at BB-8. “We wouldn’t be here today, without this one’s help. I mean, without this one’s help, uh, sir.”

“No formalities needed. It’s peacetime now, remember?”

“Oh. Yeah. Uh. Of course.” His face heats in embarrassment.

Cassian sits down on a fallen log, swinging his legs over it so he faces the forest beyond them. “It’s all right. I forget too. I’ve been in this fight for a long, long time.”

Finn wants to ask just how long, but doesn’t dare. Commander Cassian, still, seems a bit like a ghost to him. He knows the man isn’t one, has eaten plenty of the meals Cassian has cooked for him and Leia, and yet, there is something nearly impossible about his presence. “Rey said that you even fought in the Clone Wars.” He doesn’t say all of what Rey had told him. She’d said that Cassian had been a Seperatist, fighting against the Jedi.

One of Cassian’s eyebrows arches up. “That does make me sound slightly older than I am.”

“But it’s true?” Finn wants to believe it is. Wants to believe that this hero, this incredible old warrior, once fought on the wrong side, before joining the light.

Cassian shrugs. “Most things are, in a certain point of view.”

“Rey says that too.” Finn sits down next to him.

“You miss her,” Cassian says, still looking out at the trees. He does that a lot, Finn has noticed. The old spy often seems to peer out into the distance, as if he still doesn’t quite believe there are no enemies hiding far away in the shadows. Perhaps, Finn now thinks, he is not the only one struggling with the idea of peace.

He doesn’t say that. He has no right to ask Cassian anything. Even now, Finn relies on the training drilled into him. Ask nothing of superior officers. Tell them nothing that may be a weakness of your own.

However, that second rule has started to crack. Finn has begun to trust his friends, trust the General, trust that maybe, just maybe, if he lets someone in, he will not be punished for it. So, when Cassian says that he misses Rey, which is more true than perhaps anything else in the galaxy, Finn replies, “I shouldn’t.”

Cassian lifts one shoulder in a slight shrug. All of his movements, Finn has noticed, are economized to take up the least amount of space possible.

Finn tries to explain. “I shouldn’t! She said I should stay here, train with Leia, that she needed some time alone. That we’d see each other soon.”

“And do you believe her?”

“I want to.”

There’s another pause. Cassian is so still that Finn wonders if the man even breathes. Finally, the old spy speaks, “do you? Or do you think that you don’t deserve to want?”

“I don’t get that. What do you mean? Deserve to want? What’s that?” Finn’s doing his usual nervous ramble, but he can’t stop. Cassian’s words pull at him, as if there’s something he’s kept covered inside of him and those words are the first tug on the fabric shrouding the truth.

“I know your life hasn’t been easy.” Cassian says, finally now glancing over at Finn. But only for a moment, as if he knows, somehow, that Finn isn’t ready for the intensity of eye contact. “And I know what it feels like to lose your family so young that you can barely remember them. The way it feels to wonder if you ever had any memories, or if all your thoughts are merely dreams. And I know…” Cassian pauses, once more, letting out a long, slow exhale.”When you have lost so much it becomes difficult to hope. To believe. To trust that you are wanted.”

Finn nods, his foot tapping out a nervous rhythm. “Yeah. I guess? I dunno. I just… I don’t know.”

Cassian’s hand moves to rest on Finn’s shaking shoulder. The presence is warm and gentle, conjuring up the ghost of a memory of a father who had once held him, before he had been Finn, before he had been a stormtrooper. But maybe that is foolish to think, Finn wonders. He had been too young for a name, how could he have a memory? How could his heart recall what his mind had forgotten?

“It’s okay not to know,” Cassian says. “But what you must do is simple.”

“Comm Rey?” Finn asks, because it’s the thought that has been circling his brain for an hour now. It’s what drove him out to this clearing, so that he could have a little privacy to rehearse whatever he was going to say. Granted, he’d given up on that idea nearly as soon as he’d started. There is simply too much to say. There has been, for too long. He should have told her sooner, should have been clearer. “I should comm Rey. That’s what you mean, right? Uh, Cassian, sir?”

“You’re a man of action,” Cassian says. In that moment, a different sort of smile appears on his face. It’s less bright, less relieved that the smile Finn has seen on the old spy when he stood at Leia’s side. “You remind me of someone I once knew.”

“A soldier in the Rebellion?” Finn asks.

“Oh, she was a rebel,” Cassian chuckles, “though never a soldier. She was far too independent for that.”

FInn’s eyes grow wide. “I’d like to hear that story, sir, if you have time.”

“Leia could tell it better than I could.” Cassian shrugs again. “My memory is clouded, these days.”

“But you remember her? This woman who you said I was like?”

“Trust me, she was a hard one to forget.”

“You, um. Well, it sounds like she was very important to you.” Finn is still bad at expressing the emotions he feels. It’s not that he doesn’t feel them, no, quite the opposite. He sometimes feels too full of emotions, too overwhelmed by all the feelings, both good and bad, that he’d never been given permission to feel as a stormtrooper, that his throat closes, and the words die, unspoken, unknown.

“She was. And still is. I loved her,” Cassian says it so simply, as if those words are not hard at all to give life to.

“Did she know that?”

Cassian nods. “It was never said. Some things don’t need to be.”

Finn looks out into the deep forest ahead, feeling the gentle pull on the Force all around him. Feeling and seeing, and yet, focusing only on what Cassian had just said. “They… they don’t?”

Cassian shakes his head. “Although, if I’ve learned one thing from this past year, sometimes, when you’re given another chance to say those words, take it.”

That part of the story, everyone, even Finn, knew to be true. They all knew how Commander Cassian had showed up in the nick of time, had saved the day, conveying all the needed data to destroy the Emperor’s final order with very little loss of life on the Resistance’s side. Everyone knew that part of the story, and for Finn, Poe, and Rey, they also knew how Cassian had come back to the General’s side, not as her spy, but as the man who loved her.

Rey had told Finn, in one of those rare quiet moments during the war, that Cassian’s love had saved Leia, by giving her something to fight for, something to return home to.

Finn had wanted to tell Rey that she was his home, she was the person he’d always fight for and the one he dreamed of returning to.

But Finn’s story was a silent one, lived out only in his head, and never spoken. He blamed himself for that, never, at least, not until now, thinking that it wasn’t his fault, but the fault of the circumstances that he had grown up within, that made him keep so much inside.

Cassian stands up now, running one had through his tousled grey hair. He’s so lean, so slight, there in the deep forest, and yet, Finn thinks that the man might be one of the strongest he has ever met.

“Thank you, sir.” Finn stands as well, fighting the urge to salute the old spy.

He replies, “just Cassian will do.”

Finn nearly leaves the conversation there, not wishing to bother the legend any longer. (He’s thought, though he’s never dared to comment to the General, that this man, unlike that other legend he had once met, was the sort that was both someone hard to annoy and someone that commanded a certain sort of quiet respect. But he’d never say that, out of respect for those legends who had passed away. And also, Finn thinks, he’ll keep that to himself out of fear for sharing an opinion about the General’s love life.)

“Something you wanted to ask me, Finn?” Cassian’s voice remains calm, as it had, even in the middle of the war.

“How did you know?”

Cassian replies, “A feeling.”

That’s an answer Finn doesn’t have the time to unpack, not now, even if he wonders a good deal about it. Instead, he asks what he’d wanted to. “You told me there was one thing I needed to do. What is it?”

Cassian, with a small, private sort of smile, says a single word. “ _Hope.”_

* * *

Finn does just that. He hopes. But not only does he hope, he also comms the Falcon as soon as Cassian melts back into the woods. The spy vanishes quickly, which is good, because Finn is sure the man doesn't need to watch Finn fail to send the comm three times, due to his own nervously shaking hands. He keeps hoping, even as his message doesn’t reach her, which means she must be deep in hyperspace somewhere.

Finn also comms Poe, but that's just to reply to the latest ridiculous message the man has sent him; some rambling story about eating dinner with Bothans and not knowing where to pass the next dish because he couldn't see any of them. The joke didn't exactly make sense, but Finn could still be glad his friend shared it. He could still be glad he had friends, now, in this time of peace.

Finn keeps hoping and thinking and hoping even as he and BB-8 head back to camp, where he knows Cassian will be cooking dinner for the three of them. It’s a sight that has become familiar to him, in these months that he has worked to master the Force powers he has. It’s a familiar, pleasant sight, but it’s not one that has ever felt quite right.

This campsite, this planet, isn’t quite home, FInn thinks. PRivately, he fears that is because he’ll never be at home in this new peace, that the only place he’ll belong is in a soldier’s bunk. But no. He must not think like that.

If Cassian, if that old spy who had once been a Separatist, had found his home, then Finn could too. He’d just have to keep hoping.

He’d get used to peacetime, just as Cassian had.

Finn keeps hoping and as the campsite comes into view, his hope morphs into joy.

Because there’s one more person sitting around the fire. She’s perched on a log between Cassian and Leia, telling some story with a great deal of emphatic gestures of her fork. She’s there, right there, only a few feet away from Finn.

Cassian catches Finn’s eyes first, though, and the old spy grins at the young soon-to-be Jedi. His advice reverberates in Finn’s heart. The last of the shroud hiding all that Finn had kept hidden from himself, all of those hopes he had given up on, now once more alive within him.

“Rey,” Finn says, trying hard to be a man of action, like Cassian had said he was. Finn desperately wanted to be the sort of man Cassian had treated him as. Finn wanted to be so much more than he thought he was. He had no idea, not yet, that he already was that sort of man, that sort of hero.

Finn had no idea that he too, one day, would be a legend.

Instead, Finn focused on trying hard to take this chance to fix what he hadn’t said before. After all, second chances don’t come along every day. With his eyes on on Rey, and his heart in his throat, Finn finds the courage to say, “I love you.”

Rey looks up at Finn. The rest of the campsite, the rest of the entire universe, falls away from him. All he sees is her eyes, her smile, her wonder. All he knows is hope, which is soon met by the rare, wonderful feeling of joy as Rey says. “I hoped you might.”

The General (who Finn is pretty sure he’ll never be able to easily call just Leia) prods Rey, gently, with her elbow. Rey laughs. “And I do, too. Come here.”

To Finn, it sounds like _come home._

And when they kiss, he knows he is home. For good. This second chance, he knows, is more than enough to build a lifetime upon. This second chance is better than he could have ever hoped for.

And this perfect moment, with Rey’s arms around him and her heart beating in time with his, this moment, is the first moment he believes he has found peace.


End file.
